Gum, Jeffery S. | Engineering Papers

NASA NTRS2012

ACCESS: Design and Sub-System Performance

Establishing improved spectrophotometric standards is important for a broad range of missions and is relevant to many astrophysical problems. ACCESS, "Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars", is a series of rocket-borne sub-orbital missions and ground-based experiments designed to enable improvements in the precision of the astrophysical flux scale through the transfer of absolute laboratory detector standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to a network of stellar standards with a calibration accuracy of 1% and a spectral resolving power of 500 across the 0.35 -1.7 micrometer bandpass.

Kaiser, Mary Elizabeth↗

NASA NTRS2005

Narrow-band EUV Multilayer Coating for the MOSES Sounding Rocket

The Multi-order Solar EUV Spectrograph (MOSES) is a slitless spectrograph designed to study solar He II emission at 303.8 Angstroms, to be launched on a sounding rocket payload. One difference between MOSES and other slitless spectrographs is that the images are recorded simultaneously at three spectral orders, m = -1,0, +l. Another is the addition of a narrow-band multilayer coating on both the grating and the fold flat, which will reject out-of-band lines that normally contaminate the image of a slitless instrument. The primary metrics f a the mating were high peak reflectivity and suppression of Fe XV and XVI emission lines at 284 Angstroms and 335 Angstroms, respectively. We chose B4C/Mg2Si for our material combination since it provides better values for all three metrics together than the other leading candidates Si/Ir, Si/B4C or Si/SiC. Measurements of witness flats at NIST indicate the peak reflectivity at 303.6 is 38.5% for a 15 bilayer stack, while the suppression at 284 Angstroms, is 4.5x and at 335 Angstroms is 18.3x for each of two reflections in the instrument. We present the results of coating the MOSES flight gratings and fold flat, including the spectral response of the fold flat and grating as measured at NIST's SURF III and Brookhaven's X24C beamline.

Owens, Scott M.↗